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CD
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MORR 188CD
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Following a ten-year hiatus, multi-instrumentalists Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoît Pioulard return with How to Color a Thousand Mistakes, their third LP together as Orcas. Building on the electronic minimalism of Orcas (MORR 111CD, 2012) and the Twin Peaks-inspired haze of Yearling (MORR 128CD, 2014), the duo have expanded their sound and vision into a full-spectrum ensemble. Recorded in a variety of studios and cities including Brooklyn, Cambridge, Oxford, Seattle, and upstate New York, the resulting album, under the tutelage of UK producer James Brown (Arctic Monkeys, Kevin Shields, Nine Inch Nails), is a patiently-crafted beast, equally inspired by impressionism, British new wave, and dream pop. With Irisarri's guidance and Brown's encouragement, Pioulard brings his velvety voice to its harmonized peak on songs like "Wrong Way to Fall" and the Durutti Column-indebted "Fare." Where his most recent solo albums for Morr Music (Sylva and Eidetic) navigated foggy forests of ambient pop and stacked tape loops, here his characteristic blur shifts into focus with a unique degree of clarity and confidence. Lead single, "Riptide," is a summary of Pioulard's life changes and personal upheavals in the past decade, "flitting eastward toward a yen deep in the past" and learning to glide through the tumult of ocean waves, as a metaphor for the punches one takes in pursuit of grace. Its towering, key-changing midsection arrives with the monumental drumming of Slowdive's Simon Scott. On third-act highlight, "Bruise," Scott is doubled on the drum kit by MONO's Dahm Majuri Cipolla, whose Liebezeit-influenced metronomy anchors a nimble bass groove from Andrew Tasselmyer (of Hotel Neon), and some of the album's most syncopated, spaced-out interplay, courtesy of Puerto Rican guitar player Orlando Méndez (a childhood friend of Irisarri's). Throughout How to Color a Thousand Mistakes, Irisarri uses his deep well of production experience to paint the stereo field with meticulously designed textures, exemplified on the slow burn of "Heaven's Despite" and the heady rush of "Swells." How to Color a Thousand Mistakes brims with tight, complex art rock songwriting, masterful production, and sonic versatility, informed by a plethora of genres and tonal hues. The title might promise answers, but the gravitational center of the album is the dawning realization that, as you reckon with the infinite whims of the cosmos, there could be none.
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LP
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MORR 188LP
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LP version. Following a ten-year hiatus, multi-instrumentalists Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoît Pioulard return with How to Color a Thousand Mistakes, their third LP together as Orcas. Building on the electronic minimalism of Orcas (MORR 111CD, 2012) and the Twin Peaks-inspired haze of Yearling (MORR 128CD, 2014), the duo have expanded their sound and vision into a full-spectrum ensemble. Recorded in a variety of studios and cities including Brooklyn, Cambridge, Oxford, Seattle, and upstate New York, the resulting album, under the tutelage of UK producer James Brown (Arctic Monkeys, Kevin Shields, Nine Inch Nails), is a patiently-crafted beast, equally inspired by impressionism, British new wave, and dream pop. With Irisarri's guidance and Brown's encouragement, Pioulard brings his velvety voice to its harmonized peak on songs like "Wrong Way to Fall" and the Durutti Column-indebted "Fare." Where his most recent solo albums for Morr Music (Sylva and Eidetic) navigated foggy forests of ambient pop and stacked tape loops, here his characteristic blur shifts into focus with a unique degree of clarity and confidence. Lead single, "Riptide," is a summary of Pioulard's life changes and personal upheavals in the past decade, "flitting eastward toward a yen deep in the past" and learning to glide through the tumult of ocean waves, as a metaphor for the punches one takes in pursuit of grace. Its towering, key-changing midsection arrives with the monumental drumming of Slowdive's Simon Scott. On third-act highlight, "Bruise," Scott is doubled on the drum kit by MONO's Dahm Majuri Cipolla, whose Liebezeit-influenced metronomy anchors a nimble bass groove from Andrew Tasselmyer (of Hotel Neon), and some of the album's most syncopated, spaced-out interplay, courtesy of Puerto Rican guitar player Orlando Méndez (a childhood friend of Irisarri's). Throughout How to Color a Thousand Mistakes, Irisarri uses his deep well of production experience to paint the stereo field with meticulously designed textures, exemplified on the slow burn of "Heaven's Despite" and the heady rush of "Swells." How to Color a Thousand Mistakes brims with tight, complex art rock songwriting, masterful production, and sonic versatility, informed by a plethora of genres and tonal hues. The title might promise answers, but the gravitational center of the album is the dawning realization that, as you reckon with the infinite whims of the cosmos, there could be none.
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CD
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MORR 128CD
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For Yearling, Orcas members Benoît Pioulard and Rafael Anton Irisarri (The Sight Below) teamed up with Martyn Heyne (of Efterklang) on guitar and piano, and Michael Lerner (Telekinesis) on drums, to build upon the subdued ambience of their self-titled debut, adding a huge dose of analog warmth to their hazy pop leanings. A lot happens in a year -- jobs change, relationships flourish and crumble, friends leave us, and new people enter our lives. In this era of 140 characters, you may find yourself wishing from time to time that you'd written a few pages in a notebook about a certain experience or period of your life, when all those details were still fresh in your mind; Yearling does just that. Whereas many songs on Orcas' first album were built from guitar improvisations and impromptu vocal sessions, most of Yearling was constructed from short pieces Pioulard wrote and developed while staying in Germany during the summer of 2012. Working together at Heyne's Lichte Studio in Berlin and Irisarri's own Black Knoll Studio back in Seattle, they brought the album into full form over the course of the following year. Whether it's the soaring guitars of "Infinite Stillness," the Lynchian otherworldliness of "Filament," the echoes of Spirit of Eden-era Talk Talk on "Capillaries" or the slow-building tape loops of "Tell," Yearling subsists on variation while holding a lyrical center. Pioulard muses on absence, presence, dedication and distance; there's an ode to geography ("Selah") and a lamentation of discord ("An Absolute"). All attempt to reconcile the uncertainty and frailty of our combined humanity with the ardor of the individual, and to understand the measure of a year against that of a lifetime.
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LP
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MORR 128LP
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LP version. Comes in a heavy cardboard sleeve with printed innersleeve. Includes download code. For Yearling, Orcas members Benoît Pioulard and Rafael Anton Irisarri (The Sight Below) teamed up with Martyn Heyne (of Efterklang) on guitar and piano, and Michael Lerner (Telekinesis) on drums, to build upon the subdued ambience of their self-titled debut, adding a huge dose of analog warmth to their hazy pop leanings. A lot happens in a year -- jobs change, relationships flourish and crumble, friends leave us, and new people enter our lives. In this era of 140 characters, you may find yourself wishing from time to time that you'd written a few pages in a notebook about a certain experience or period of your life, when all those details were still fresh in your mind; Yearling does just that. Whereas many songs on Orcas' first album were built from guitar improvisations and impromptu vocal sessions, most of Yearling was constructed from short pieces Pioulard wrote and developed while staying in Germany during the summer of 2012. Working together at Heyne's Lichte Studio in Berlin and Irisarri's own Black Knoll Studio back in Seattle, they brought the album into full form over the course of the following year. Whether it's the soaring guitars of "Infinite Stillness," the Lynchian otherworldliness of "Filament," the echoes of Spirit of Eden-era Talk Talk on "Capillaries" or the slow-building tape loops of "Tell," Yearling subsists on variation while holding a lyrical center. Pioulard muses on absence, presence, dedication and distance; there's an ode to geography ("Selah") and a lamentation of discord ("An Absolute"). All attempt to reconcile the uncertainty and frailty of our combined humanity with the ardor of the individual, and to understand the measure of a year against that of a lifetime.
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CD
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MORR 111CD
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The courtship of ambient music and traditional songform has been a long and tenuous one, almost to the point that their differences seem irreconcilable. Spanning decades with only a few points of obscure intersections, the occasions on which the two styles have met and crossed into the pop culture lexicon have often yielded a contrary, oil-and-water form. The abstract nature of the "ambient" genre and instant gratification of the "pop" song require deft hands for successful cohabitation, thus it is little wonder that there are so few practitioners of its delicate equilibrium. Orcas -- comprised of haze-pop auteur Benoît Pioulard and post-minimalist composer Rafael Anton Irisarri -- is an imaginative return to that narrative. Theirs is a style deeply rooted in personal variations on songform and ambient craft, and as a duo they bridge the furthest outlying aspects of their previous solo work published on Kranky, Touch, Miasmah, Room40, and Ghostly International. Here, song and abstraction become one entity, condensing the spaces between to generate an arching trajectory. This co-mingling of contrasts is even coded into their moniker; Pioulard and Irisarri have chosen an iconic symbol of the American Pacific Northwest, a methodical sea hunter that is also a totem of the open oceans' expanse. The so-called "wolf of the seas" that evokes a quiet, stately, yet powerful nature. Appropriately, their music is a careful balance of chiaroscuro elements, where pop hook and spatial ambience converge. In its environs, lyricism flows as a time-distended dynamic, rising and falling, proceeding almost antithetically to pop's typical gratification ethos. Orcas has taken an immersive, fluid vector for their passions; a resonant call, like sonar from the depths.
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LP
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MORR 111LP
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LP version. The courtship of ambient music and traditional songform has been a long and tenuous one, almost to the point that their differences seem irreconcilable. Spanning decades with only a few points of obscure intersections, the occasions on which the two styles have met and crossed into the pop culture lexicon have often yielded a contrary, oil-and-water form. The abstract nature of the "ambient" genre and instant gratification of the "pop" song require deft hands for successful cohabitation, thus it is little wonder that there are so few practitioners of its delicate equilibrium. Orcas -- comprised of haze-pop auteur Benoît Pioulard and post-minimalist composer Rafael Anton Irisarri -- is an imaginative return to that narrative. Theirs is a style deeply rooted in personal variations on songform and ambient craft, and as a duo they bridge the furthest outlying aspects of their previous solo work published on Kranky, Touch, Miasmah, Room40, and Ghostly International. Here, song and abstraction become one entity, condensing the spaces between to generate an arching trajectory. This co-mingling of contrasts is even coded into their moniker; Pioulard and Irisarri have chosen an iconic symbol of the American Pacific Northwest, a methodical sea hunter that is also a totem of the open oceans' expanse. The so-called "wolf of the seas" that evokes a quiet, stately, yet powerful nature. Appropriately, their music is a careful balance of chiaroscuro elements, where pop hook and spatial ambience converge. In its environs, lyricism flows as a time-distended dynamic, rising and falling, proceeding almost antithetically to pop's typical gratification ethos. Orcas has taken an immersive, fluid vector for their passions; a resonant call, like sonar from the depths. Includes a free mp3 download, including two previously-unreleased bonus tracks.
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